With Navalny’s death, Russia’s opposition loses its last leader
-
Fred Weir Special correspondent
| Moscow
Alexei Navalny, Russia’s best-known and most indefatigable Kremlin opposition figure who died in an Arctic penal colony Friday under as yet unknown circumstances, might best be viewed as the proverbial “canary in the coal mine” of Russian politics.
Mr. Navalny’s life was often a sharp illustration of the hopes, frustrations, and limits faced by the first post-Soviet generation under the nearly 2 1/2 decades of Vladimir Putin’s rule. At every stage, he pushed the limits.
Why We Wrote This
Many in the West saw Alexei Navalny as the Russian opposition’s most promising challenger to Vladimir Putin. His death in prison on Friday brings a tragic end to a struggle the Kremlin had already largely contained.
Mr. Navalny believed that Kremlin power was a weak facade and might be toppled by protests from below. In the run-up to the 2018 presidential elections, he organized street demonstrations that hit 100 Russian cities and put him on the map as Russia’s premier opposition figure.
It will be widely assumed that the Kremlin ordered Mr. Navalny’s death. But it remains unclear what his legacy will be, as he joins a list of Putin opponents who have met grisly ends over the past two decades.
“Navalny became a symbol of the democratic part of the opposition, and his death doesn’t mean the opposition will disappear,” says Alexander Verkhovsky, who tracks extremist trends in Russia. “Indeed, it suggests that our authorities are at a dead end.”
Alexei Navalny, Russia’s best-known and most indefatigable Kremlin opposition figure who died in an Arctic penal colony Friday under as yet unknown circumstances, might best be viewed as the proverbial “canary in the coal mine” of Russian politics.
Mr. Navalny’s life was often a sharp illustration of the hopes, frustrations, and limits faced by the first post-Soviet generation under the nearly 2 1/2 decades of Vladimir Putin’s rule. At every stage, he pushed the limits. He enjoyed some unusual successes, and was punished in ways both predictable – as through the Kremlin-controlled legal system – and bizarre, such as via his 2020 poisoning with an exotic nerve agent and now his sudden untimely death.
Very little is known about Mr. Navalny’s demise, which according to prison officials happened quickly after he returned from a walk in the maximum-security prison above the Arctic Circle known as Polar Wolf, where he had recently been transferred.
Why We Wrote This
Many in the West saw Alexei Navalny as the Russian opposition’s most promising challenger to Vladimir Putin. His death in prison on Friday brings a tragic end to a struggle the Kremlin had already largely contained.
The prison is notorious for its harsh punishment regime, including solitary confinement, about which Mr. Navalny had complained repeatedly on his social media accounts. On the other hand, he was a relatively young and healthy man, and there had been few indications of ill health.
“Navalny was a real opposition leader, and such leaders are not welcome in Russia. Our system does not need them,” says Alexei Kondaurov, a former KGB general and, more recently, opposition deputy of the State Duma. “With his passing, there is practically no one left. To quote the poet Alexander Pushkin, ‘Some are far distant, some are dead.’”
Rise and fall
Mr. Navalny was a young lawyer who dabbled in liberal and nationalist politics at the dawn of the Putin era. He gradually grew dissatisfied with established parties and began cultivating his own largely youthful following for a political agenda that was always hard to pin down, but was definitely anti-corruption, anti-authoritarian, and anti-Putin.
Unlike older Russian politicians, he was a master of social media and a brilliant blogger. His political stardom began to rise amid the mass protest movement that emerged after disputed Duma elections in 2011 and Mr. Putin’s return to the presidency the next year.
He made a major impact when he ran for mayor of Moscow in a snap election held in 2013. It was the only time the Putin-era system of “managed democracy” ever allowed Mr. Navalny on a ballot, even though he’d just received the first of many criminal convictions. He shocked many by winning 27% of the votes against the Kremlin-anointed acting mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, who got 51%. It was characteristic of Mr. Navalny’s unrelenting style that he repeatedly challenged the result, in court and in public speeches.
Mr. Navalny, like many in Russia’s increasingly marginalized opposition, believed that Kremlin power was a weak facade and might be toppled by protests from below. In the run-up to the 2018 presidential elections, he organized street demonstrations that hit 100 Russian cities and put him on the map as Russia’s premier opposition figure. He made a special outreach to Russia’s Putin-era youth, though his efforts to radicalize them appears to have brought no lasting impact.
By 2020, it seemed that the Kremlin had contained the Navalny challenge, tolerating his activities that, though irritating to authorities, did not seem to create serious problems in the streets or in the carefully managed elections at various levels. Then, while on an organizing trip to Siberia, he fell deathly ill and was evacuated to Germany, where it was determined that he’d been poisoned by the nerve agent Novichok.
After his recovery, Mr. Navalny again demonstrated his tough, irrepressible character by declining a life of comfortable exile and returning to Russia with an appeal for people to take to the streets to overthrow Mr. Putin. He was arrested upon his arrival and subjected to a series of criminal sentences, an ordeal which ended with his death at the Polar Wolf prison colony.
What was the motive?
What baffles many observers is not the predictable repression of Russia’s state machinery, which reliably put Mr. Navalny out of political action more or less permanently. Rather, it is the capricious nature of his death, which, like the earlier Novichok poisoning, would seem to bring the Kremlin few benefits.
“The peak of Navalny’s popularity was in 2021, when he returned to Russia, and his name was on everyone’s lips,” says Denis Volkov, director of the Levada Center, Russia’s only independent polling agency. “His approval rating in those days was around 20%. After his arrest, and his disappearance from TV screens, his rating began to decline. By January 2024, it was less than 1%.”
It will be widely assumed that the Kremlin ordered Mr. Navalny’s death, and there seems no doubt that Mr. Putin ultimately owns the whole sordid story.
But many Russians will believe, as they did during the earlier episode of Novichok poisoning, that Western intelligence agencies are somehow to blame.
“This death of Navalny comes at the worst possible moment for Putin, who is running for reelection and absolutely does not need this kind of publicity,” says Sergei Markov, a former Kremlin adviser. “What we are witnessing is a murky undercover battle of secret services, and Navalny was just their pawn.”
It remains unclear what Mr. Navalny’s legacy will be, as he joins a list of Putin opponents who have met grisly and often inexplicable ends over the past two decades.
“Navalny became a symbol of the democratic part of the opposition, and his death doesn’t mean the opposition will disappear,” says Alexander Verkhovsky, director of the Sova Center, which tracks extremist trends in Russia. “Indeed, it suggests that our authorities are at a dead end.”
